President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s spokesperson George Charamba, has dismissed allegations stemming from leaked audio recordings involving Wicknell Chivayo, a controversial “businessman”.
Chivayo claims his relationship with Mnangagwa enables him to get multi-million-dollar government contracts for self-enrichment.
However, using the pseudonym dhonzamusoro007, Charamba posted on X, questioning the authenticity of the recordings and suggesting that the entire affair was orchestrated to tarnish the President’s reputation.
In a statement, Charamba addressed several issues including Chivayo’s alleged US$40 million deal with the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), why Mnangagwa announced Chivayo’s deal with Starlink, and name-dropping by certain individuals. He wrote:
WHAT INSANITY: You have business partners who dribble one another. In the ensuing fallout, one of them allegedly name-drops in order to scare away the rest. I am supposed to be exercised by such a bald form of self-defence through name-dropping on the part of a party to the dispute?
The offensive name-dropping automatically indicts the President and Government? Claims don’t become true because they have been made.
Or because some detractors of His Excellency the President, Dr ED Mnangagwa, in chorus form wish them to be so.
ZEC is an independent Commission protected by the law. It enters into contracts as it sees fit, and in terms of the laws of the country.
Government may not interfere in its decisions, without raising fundamental questions on the Commission’s independence.
No one should incite the Government into breaking the law by diminishing ZEC’s status as a legal persona. Besides, it cannot answer for itself.
No one has approached it for a comment, in the current mad stampede to self-interview, and to become a self-appointed jury.
As for Starlink, aaaah, nothing couldn’t be more absurd. At the risk of sounding stupid, let me remind everyone, including Trevor Ncube’s NewsDay, that Starlink is not a govt parastatal. Who it goes into partnership with is its business.
Unless one is beside oneself, one cannot cite CDE Chivhayo’s deal with Starlink – whatever it is or amounts to – as evidence that he is being favored in the award and issuance of Government tenders. There is no Government in Starlink; there is no Govt tender either!
His Excellency the President merely announced Government’s authorization of the service, after positive recommendations from a Cabinet Committee set up to advise Government on the prudence or otherwise of allowing the satellite service in the country.
On the whole, claims meant to intimidate others involved in a partnership so far away from the domain of Government, cannot be an issue for the President, his Office, or Government as a whole.
Is it not interesting that no one in the censorious formal or social media has taken the trouble to interview Wicknell Chivhayo, firstly to authenticate the voice clip; secondly to hear his side of the story?
Why does one get the sense there is a determination to sow and cultivate mere tall claims whose relationship to the media-accused is yet to be proven, hoping that such claims will one day attach to the President, grow and mature into some nonexistent scandal enormous enough to trip him? Nothing can be more insane!
